The GHOST Vulnerability : What to know

On January 27th, security researchers announced the discovery of a potential security vulnerability that has been nicknamed “GHOST“.  In short, GHOST takes advantage of an earlier version of glibc that could allow an attacker to cause a buffer overflow, allowing the execution of arbitrary code.

This vulnerability is not present in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 — as the latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise ships with a newer version of glibc (2.19) which has already corrected this vulnerability.

Systems with earlier versions of glibc — such as SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and 11 — may be affected.  The good news is that there are patches already available for these versions, that can be easily applied, to remove the vulnerability.

More detailed information on the GHOST vulnerability, and the available patches to remove the vulnerability, can be found in the SUSE Knowledge Base and the Update Advisories page.